Living a dream, having it all

The long journey women have undertaken, from the kitchen to the boardroom, has not been easy. On the surface, the modern woman today is living a dream and having it all. But, is it really so, wonders Jahnavi Barua

There is a cartoon going around these days where a woman is standing at a wishing well, wishing that her load of cleaning, cooking and housework be taken off her and that she receive more money, instead. The deity of the well obliges and in a puff of magic, she is turned into a man! Many women would secretly applaud this, certainly many from our part of the world and perhaps, working women the most. Not those women who have been fortunate enough to find life-partners and families who support their choice of working inside — there are many, many women working from home these days — or outside the home, in the right way, and not the single woman, who has a lighter, more flexible load of household chores. These are the fortunate few. For others, managing a career within the traditional family setup where, despite verbal support of their work, the woman is still expected to look after all the things in the house, a slow realisation dawns that while they seem to have progressed leap years beyond their mothers’ and grandmothers’ wildest dreams, they have not moved from that familiar spot at all.

On the surface, the modern woman today is living a dream and having it all, as is frequently reported in the media. “All” means having a family and at the same time pursuing a career, thus being financially independent. This is what previous generations of women had fought for ferociously, the right of women, in years to come, to be able to step out of the kitchen and into an office or a classroom or a hospital, even a spaceship soaring into space. And women did achieve that. In the ‘40s and ‘50s, only a handful of Indian women would consider working at a career outside the home and if they did, in all likelihood, they would have been dissuaded from or prevented from doing so by their loved ones. Then in the ‘60s and ‘70s, bolstered by support from their mothers, grandmothers and sometimes — astonishingly — by fathers, husbands and fathers-in-law, women left home to work outside. To earn a living, in classrooms, hospitals, courts of justice. As the momentum picked up, the daughters of these women ventured even further, into exciting, hitherto unexplored terrain: the army, the navy, the air force, into filmmaking and theatre, construction and engineering, all so far considered male domains.

Reality check

A dream, that was what women had begun to live. In the beginning, it was a heady feeling just going out to work at all. Women did anything to get to work: waking up at unearthly hours of the morning to get school lunches made for children, the tiffin packed for the husband; some did the laundry too before setting out or came back later to it in the evening after a hard day’s grind. In those early days, many women would have come home to similar scenes: the husband and children, maybe the parents-in-law too, waiting for her to get back so she could get tea laid out, dinner started and the children’s homework attended to. The woman who had no children yet was spared the homework and school duties and the unmarried single woman was perhaps the only one really living a dream. The reality was that the woman was allowed to go to work having guaranteed that the family would not suffer.

It did not matter that she too was now earning an income and adding to the family’s bank balance, she had to ensure at the same time that the household chores were discharged honourably while she was at it. Still, the manner in which family and society was structured in those times helped the working woman. If the parents-in-law lived with her, a supportive mother-in-law would sometimes help out with the children or the kitchen. Household help was still not difficult to find and with their help, women somehow stumbled along. Rare in those days was the husband who took on equal responsibility in the house. Many men did shoulder certain traditional chores; the daily shopping — in some parts of India, such as the East — was taken care of by the men. Financial matters was something they always looked after. And that was that. What was considered a woman’s charge remained hers even when she stepped out to work: kitchen and food, cleaning the house, laundry and children. All these portfolios did not shift hands. The man rarely felt the need to pitch in and share some of this, now that the woman had taken on work outside. In that sense, women had not really left the kitchen at all.

The world began spinning faster in these last two decades. Between our mother’s times and ours, there was but little difference. Enid Blyton and then Little Women were read by that generation and handed down to the daughters; clothes were still stitched at the local tailors, frocks for the girls, shirts and shorts for the boys.

Telephones for both generations were squat black things attached to wires that went down with the first rains and one had to book something called a trunk call to speak to loved ones on the other side of the country.

The changes that have taken place since have wiped out all memory of how things used to be. Mobile phones ring everywhere you look, people talk to people thousands of miles away, they can even see the ones they talk to on Skype; clothes are bought off the shelf and brands from across the world drop into one’s lap at the click of a mouse; children have no time to read, what with all their electronic playmates beckoning enticingly; if they were to read, they would probably do so on their Kindle and it would be an e-book, accessible again at the click of another mouse. The world has been transformed into something out of a science-fiction movie and it is not slowing down, it is only spinning faster. And faster.

In this changing, shifting world, one thing has not changed still, at least not noticeably, in our part of the world. Rare still is that man who takes equal responsibility inside the house, thus truly allowing his wife to work without fear, without strain and without guilt outside or inside the home. And, unlike in days gone by, the old support structure of the family, the neighbours, and reliable household help is fast disappearing. Very soon, these venerable institutions will probably be extinct, dead as the dodo. The pressure on women in our part of the world will be unimaginable.

Situation abroad

In the western world, new structures have been created to replace these old ones: there is organised care for children that is free in some of the more enlightened countries and accessible on payment in others; there is legislation that allows a woman necessary time off from work, to attend to children after pregnancy. Then, there are reliable cleaning services that can be trusted to let themselves into your home and clean it for a fee, and there are all kinds of products in the market that make the necessary chore of cooking that much easier. Precooked rice, for instance; a chicken breast that is not only cleaned but stuffed with herbs and other ingredients, ready to go into the oven. But most importantly, transcending all these modern conveniences is the fact of their men accepting without reservation the idea that all family and household responsibilities are to be shared. There is no debate there, all differences on these issues have been settled over the last few decades and they have arrived at a happy equilibrium.

There is no such equilibrium here, in our country. There is no organised support as far as children and the home are concerned at all. Not from the heart of a family and certainly not at the workplace, where often a woman is tested again and again, as employers seek to find how dedicated a woman is to her work. Any sign of weakness here; any mention of wanting a morning off to take a sick child to hospital is seen as an unforgivable weakness, a lack of professionalism on the woman’s part. A woman has to be remarkably inventive to work around these difficulties and survive. An impossible task and so daunting that a new phenomenon has surfaced, quietly but surely, in these last few years. Educated women have been silently leaving the workforce; without making a hue and cry, but with a heavy heart, they have come to that decision. To quit and take on the family responsibilities full-time. There have been studies that show while women form a substantial part of the workforce at junior and middle levels, there are few women at the very senior levels of any workforce in the country. This pattern reflects fairly accurately the course of a woman’s life: when young and single, she is able to dedicate all her energies to her work; when young and just married, she is still able to pursue her career. Once the children arrive, things get difficult and this is when women without support drop out of the office into the home. Their ranks in middle management are thus depleted and then, from there on the numbers only get smaller. Eventually, a woman arrives back where her mother and grandmother started from — the kitchen.

Unfortunate, that the country has to face this loss; unfortunate, that qualified women who have worked towards a goal have to give up everything silently. As if their individual loss was not enough, very often, they have to fend off criticism from segments of society who feel that the women are giving up too easily, are wasting a degree. The insinuation here is that the woman was weak, not to be able to rise to her unique challenge. Nothing could be farther from the truth, for, what the woman has had to delve into before taking this life-changing decision is the courage at the core of her being. She is only too aware that in our country it is not easy, sometimes impossible even, to come back into a career having stepped out of it to take care of the family. It is not in any way a light-hearted, weak decision but one that is taken because of a complete lack of options. Alas, the dream previous ranks of women had are not for everyone. Not just yet. But there is hope.
One always can hope that circumstances will change and the critical support that a woman needs to balance both her career and her family will be readily available in the years to come. That every woman will be able to live her dream and have it all.